


Each Life Converges to Some Centre

by neifile7



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neifile7/pseuds/neifile7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you’re going to play intergalactic dustman, you’ll probably fall in love with grit and damage along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each Life Converges to Some Centre

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_fjords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_fjords/gifts).



> First published on LJ on 1/30/09.

_The Heavens stripped ---_

_Eternity’s vast pocket, picked ---_

 

When Suzie looks at the lot of them, she has to hand it to Jack: he has pure genius for attracting the clapped-out and brilliant.  Much like the junk that comes through the Rift, she supposes.  Orphans hauled from the universal shitstorm, that’s what they are, or maybe just the ultimate proof of how much Jack adores what can’t be fixed.  If you’re going to play intergalactic dustman, you’ll probably fall in love with grit and damage along the way.

 

Jack is trouble, Suzie knows that.  All that gorgeous sexual bravado that you just _know_ is overcompensating for something (although Suzie has verified, to her cost, that it’s not about size or performance).  He’s a walking oxymoron, freely dispensing affection but dangerously elusive. She can’t get a handle on him at all.  Shedding her clothes and slipping into his cot that one night had seemed the right way to short-cut his evasions, but she left no wiser.  Well, he’d been inventive and thoroughly distracting, as per reputation, but it wouldn’t do to let him think that meant a thing to her.

 

Owen’s all right, she supposes, even if he tends to think that the universe has screwed him over more thoroughly than the rest.  At least he turns the self-pity into a kind of piss-and-vinegar grudge that’s good for a laugh and gives a satisfying edge to the sex.  But you can just _tell_ that he’s kind of bloke who hated his mother and had to put his Great Love on a pedestal and will whinge about women and practice non-attachment right up to male menopause.  Not that Suzie plans to stick around, but he’ll be tiresome once the challenge she poses gets old.

 

Toshiko irritates the crap out of her.  She’s a huge asset, of course, a brilliant tech who does great work on Mainframe and takes a lot of scutwork off her hands.  But she’s altogether too much of a good-girl geek for Suzie’s tastes, with absolutely no sense of self-preservation.  There’s her misguided crusade to save her mother, her embarrassing reverence for Jack, and her spaniel-eyed mooning over Owen (a lost cause if ever there was one, but Suzie supposes that Tosh longs to rescue him as well).  Suzie’s never had much patience for Japanese concepts of honor or filial piety (let alone for PC strictures against cultural stereotyping), but none of it’s her business.

 

The new bloke, Ianto – god knows what he’s doing here.  You’d think anyone who got out of Canary Wharf with a whole skin would get as far away from Torchwood as possible, not chase after Jack with a fancy suit and a pterodactyl.  Definitely more to him than meets the eye, nice as _that_ is to look at, and much too bright to be wasting his life on filing and coffee.  That snarky deference thing he has going is brilliant – really, who knew that would be the best way to snag and then deflect Jack’s interest?  Clear who’s the boss there.  The rest of the time, well, he’s too hooded and skittish to be worth cultivating.

 

She doesn’t like or dislike any of them, really.  She just doesn’t have anything to say to them.  She’d rather unburden herself to someone sympathetic and stupid who has no clue just how fucked up the universe really is.

 

Suzie remembers wonder, that’s the thing.  She recalls a far-off place with someone who read her poetry and brushed her hair and took her stargazing, who beamed with shared pride over every school prize, who taught her all she knows about challenge.  So many enchanting bedtime stories back there, before they vanished under the sharp end of a belt-buckle and a hand over her mouth and another down her pajamas.

 

Remembering is how she gets through the days when there’s too much distance between Jack’s gorgeous tall tales and the shit that lands in their laps.  She’s still waiting for the Rift to bring her something beautiful, something unbroken, something that could knit the world back together for her.   Too late to hope that it will change everything, but when it comes, she’ll be ready.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph from Emily Dickinson (I know, it's been done to death, but she is truly an amazing fit for Suzie).


End file.
